Nutritional Perspectives

Over the course of the last few months I’ve received an education in the science of human nutrition from www.wholehealthsource.blogspot.com. It is written by Stephan Guyenet, a recently anointed Ph.D. in neurobiology and currently a researcher on neurodegenerative diseases. Since his blog has been the most important influence in transforming my view of nutrition and, after long consideration, my actual diet as well—I’ve decided to share an overview of it.

This guy runs one of the best nutrition sites out there. His philosophy is grounded in very simple historical and comparative observations of human health in different societies with different diets. To refine and supplement this anthropological/observational information, he independently analyzes contemporary scientific studies of human nutrition—with an emphasis on quality intervention studies (the only ones that count).

The human societies which consistently evince the best health outcomes are those which adhere to a hunter-gatherer (H-G) diet (called the “Paleo diet”). The archaeological record provides considerable evidence of this. There does not seem to be much dispute among the experts that human health declined, in a variety of ways, with the advent of agriculture. Additionally, in the last century, modern observation and testing of H-Gs who continued to follow traditional diets reinforced this historical evidence. The diseases of civilization, in particular cardiovascular disease and cancer (but also a number of less serious conditions), are much rarer among H-Gs than among westerners of the same age. This result holds regardless of the specific dietary composition of a given society, so long as they are hunter-gatherers. And the variation in diet between different H-G societies is extreme.

Remember, among all the groups I will mention in the ensuing examples, these diseases of civilization are virtually unheard of. Traditionally, Inuit relied upon animal food to provide 95% of their calories; and 70%+ came from animal fat. In contrast, the Kitavans, currently resident in the South Pacific, derive 70% of their calories from carbohydrates and 70% smoke cigarettes (but no heart attacks were found in the population). Traditional Masai, cow herders in southern Africa, lived on a diet of fermented whole raw milk, cow blood, meat and organs, and herbs—this amounts to 70% fat, 35% saturated fat, and, like the Inuit, 5% of calories from plant sources. The traditional Masai do not know what a heart attack is, do not recognize the symptoms, show no clinical signs of heart attacks. Fifty were autopsied recently, about a third of them over 50 years old, and, though those who were no longer following a strict traditional diet had atherosclerosis, not one had had a heart attack. Unlike the Kitavans the Tokelauans, another group in the south Pacific, consume a high fat diet: 50-60% fat, including 40-50% of all calories as saturated fat (from coconuts), the highest saturated fat consumption yet found in any traditional society. In 1982, all Tokelauan men aged 40-69 were given ECGs and none showed signs of prior heart attack—but 3.5% of Alabamans of the same age show signs of prior heart attack. I suppose it’s worth adding that the exercise levels in these groups vary greatly, from the Masai who do a lot of walking to the Kitavans, whose activity level is comparable to a modern European. In other words, there is good reason to believe that exercise is not the key factor. Diet is. A diet that has flown off the evolutionary rails causes diseases of civilization.

Stephan goes through the epidemiological studies from which the above data is derived. The point isn’t simply to advocate a high fat or a carnivorous diet, since groups like the Kitavans have relatively low fat and less carnivorous diets (though all known hunter-gatherer groups consume animal foods and the average intake among the 229 known groups analyzed by Loren Cordain is 50% of calories from animals and fish--although, it's well to note that most of these societies have veered away from a pure H-G lifestyle to some degree). The lesson to be drawn here, the element that all these healthy societies have in common, along with all known historical and current hunter-gatherers—is what they do not eat. Hunter-Gatherers do not eat grains, refined sugars, industrial vegetable oils, or food additives and chemicals. Instead, they eat, in greatly varying proportions, depending upon the availability in their environment: meat (always including organs), vegetables (esp. tubers and other root vegetables with high calorie counts), seafood, fruit, nuts, insects, herbs—on average, in that order from most to least calories.

The reason postulated for the apparent ill effects of the foods on the “do not eat” list is that humans have not evolved to eat them. Human evolution is a slow process of competitive adaptation to a constantly changing environment. Various forms of the hunter-gatherer diet have been followed by humans and our direct evolutionary ancestors for 2 million years--sufficient time to evolve optimal fitness for this diet. But, grains were only first domesticated 10,000 years ago. And the majority of humanity probably wasn’t eating them until 5,000 years ago. That is 5,000 years of evolutionary adaptation vs. 2 million years. Even the 10,000 Year Explosion of Cochran and Harpending does not nullify this argument, though it does somewhat attenuate it. Refined sugars are still more recent. As for industrial vegetable oils and food chemicals, they were the products of the 20th century—a circumstance that has permitted virtually no evolutionary adaptation. We are not adapted to these foods. In some cases this is obvious: for example, most of the world is lactose intolerant because they have not had sufficient time to adapt to cow milk. This example is also useful as an illustration that evolution, per Cochran and Harpending, does not stop: some humans evolved lactose tolerance in the last few thousand years. A further complication is that consuming pasteurized milk is different from fresh or fermented raw whole milk--also, consuming the latest breeds of wheat prepared by the food industry is different from consuming traditional einkorn wheat prepared in traditional ways. Those who consume foods developed in Neolithic times endanger their health to one degree or another. This is where Stephan starts; this is the first element of his nutritional philosophy, a clearly defined apprehension of what foods are presumptively safe and what foods are questionable.

From this epidemiological-evolutionary foundation, he then analyzes the scientific literature on nutrition. The simplest approach is to determine which of the hunter-gatherer dietary options might be healthiest and why. Also, this approach begs the question: why should we confine ourselves only to this set of options, the known range of H-G diets? This represents a shrewd humility in face of considerable scientific ignorance of human nutrition. Human physiology is an enormously complex system with a virtually infinite number of variables. Many of these variables are effectively unknown, as are their interactions. Scientists find it difficult to generate useful conclusions from such an irreducible chaos of information. Given the level of complexity and chaos, I would even venture that we will never develop a total understanding of human biology. We may instead, to achieve progress, eventually pursue simplification by means of transforming ourselves, piece by piece, into cyborgs. But, the point is, the most useful evidence we have to discover optimal nutrition is the signposts left by the evolutionary process. Evolution has done much of the work for us over thousands of generations of trial and error. Science, for now, remains a comparatively weak resource in this area and ought be seen, for practical purposes, as the handmaiden of evolutionary reasoning.

Another aspect he covers occasionally are the practical challenges of adopting a Paleo diet in 21st century America. It’s neither easy nor particularly cheap to do it right. Also, it can be difficult to decide which type of Paleo diet to pursue—though personal tastes, finances, convenience, digestive idiosyncrasies, and other factors tend to narrow it down quite a bit before arbitrary choices arise.

There are a great many blogs on the Paleo diet; and Stephan has many important predecessors (Weston Price being his acknowledged favorite) and competent contemporaries (Gary Taubes seems to be one of the most significant). I find the following blogs quite useful also (the first has an excellent twelve-step summary of how to follow a paleo diet--though many paleo advocates would argue that a higher intake of quality carbs is harmless): 

http://www.paleonu.com/,

http://www.cholesterol-and-health.com/cholesterol-blog.html

http://perfecthealthdiet.com/ 

 

 

Socialism in Action

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/nyregion/14hunger.html?hpw   "The South Bronx, Plagued by Obesity, Tops a Hunger Survey" You've got to love a headline like that! How did they determine these denizens are hungry? Well, they asked them whether they were short of food money at least once in the last year. In America, answering yes is sufficient to define you as hungry--at least, under socialist lights. Who believes this crap? It's not enough that we feed these morons with food stamps and free school lunch and breakfast--now they want us to subsidize the healthy items of their free food--since they cannot make intelligent decisions for themselves. They do not have healthy foods in these areas because businesses cannot make money selling what people do not want. It's no accident that this area is entirely overrun with blacks, puerto ricans, and dominicans--the third world imported to America and put on welfare because they cannot function in a first world society. The socialists know this--they will not say they know it, but their actions betray the knowledge. An eloquent British perspective on this issue, fortified with "knowledge by acquaintance": https://www.city-journal.org/html/starving-criminal-12383.html Excerpts: The existence of malnutrition in the midst of plenty has not entirely escaped either the intelligentsia or the government, which of course is proposing measures to combat it: but, as usual, neither pols nor pundits wish to look the problem in the face or make the obvious connections. For them, the real and most pressing question raised by any social problem is: “How do I appear concerned and compassionate to all my friends, colleagues, and peers?” Needless to say, the first imperative is to avoid any hint of blaming the victim by examining the bad choices that he makes. It is not even permissible to look at the reasons for those choices, since by definition victims are victims and therefore not responsible for their acts, unlike the relatively small class of human beings who are not victims....He feels the need to retreat into impersonal abstractions, into structures or alleged structures over which the victim has no control. And out of this need to avoid the rawness of reality he spins utopian schemes of social engineering. The British intelligentsia has thus come up with an abstraction that fits this particular bill perfectly—that is to say, the need to explain widespread malnutrition in the midst of plenty without resort to the conduct of the malnourished themselves: food deserts....The only homes in which there were ever any signs of genuine cookery and of eating as a social activity, where families discussed the topics of daily life and affirmed their bonds to one another, were those of the Indian immigrants. In white and black homes, cookery meant (at its best) re-heating in a microwave oven, and there was no table round which people could sit together to eat the re-heated food. Meals here were solitary, poor, nasty, British, and short....The Indian immigrants and their descendants inherited a far better and more elaborate cuisine than the native British, of course, but this is not a sufficient explanation of their willingness still to buy fresh food and to cook it: they continue to cook because they still live in families, and cookery is a socially motivated art. Even among Indian heroin addicts (principally Muslim), the kind of malnutrition I have described is rare, because they do not yet live in the solipsistic isolation of their white counterparts, who live alone, even when there are other people inhabiting the house or apartment in which they themselves live....If food deserts truly exist—and they cannot in these times of easy transport be very extensive—the explanation lies in demand, not in supply. And demand is a cultural phenomenon... The connections I have drawn are obvious, yet denied—or rather avoided altogether—in the typical modern British approach to social problems... The liberal intelligentsia has several reasons for failing to see or admit the cultural dimension of malnutrition in the midst of plenty—in failing to see its connection with an entire way of life—and in throwing the blame instead onto the supermarket chains. One reason is to avoid confronting the human consequences of the changes in morals, manners, and social policy that it has consistently advocated. The second is to avoid all appearance of blaming people whose lives are poor and unenviable. That this approach leads it to view those same people as helpless automata, in the grip of forces that they cannot influence, let alone control—and therefore as not full members of the human race—does not worry the intelligentsia in the least. On the contrary, it increases the importance of the elite’s own providential role in society. To blame the supermarket chains is implicitly to demand that the liberal and bureaucratic elite should have yet more control over society. This is how the British government’s current Food Poverty Eradication Bill should be interpreted. By attempting to tackle the sources of supply rather than those of demand, it will sidestep the question of an entire way of life—a problem that it would take genuine moral courage to tackle—and aim at an easy target instead. The government will increase bureaucracy and regulation without reducing malnutrition. This, in miniature, is the story of modern Britain.

Wind and Weather

At a sufficiently large scale, wind turbines may well impact the atmosphere in significant ways. I think the study here is preliminary to more accurate and detailed modeling in future.  Notice, though, that the study suggests the overall climate impact of extremely large scale wind farms approaches nil. This is because, according to this report, wind farms increase temperature in their immediate vicinity when situated on land, but decrease temperature when situated at sea. The long term trend is likely to involve ever more sea-based wind farms. Also, the study indicates that even such large scale wind harvesting does not slow atmospheric wind speeds so much as to make wind farms uneconomic. In other words, I consider the article's headline entirely misleading as to the actual findings of the study.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/03/mit-researchers-say-using-wind-turbines.html

The Legal Morass

http://www.ted.com/talks/philip_howard.html This guy does a great job of defining the problems afflicting our system; the solutions he proposes are more questionable. The risk he invites is transforming our system from one abused by litigious individuals and aggressive tort lawyers to one that may be abused by the authority figures to whom he would shift power. At this point, I suspect it is worth the risk; it seems time for the pendulum to swing back (and this would involve a retracing of our legal history to some extent). A vital point, lost on many people, is the pervasive impact of the mere threat of lawsuits in our time. Even where the courts hold the line on imposing the theoretical standard of "reasonable action under the circumstances," trigger-happy plaintiffs and attorneys circumscribe our freedoms ever more narrowly with each threat they make. In other words, the people behind these threats are engaged in de facto legislation for the rest of us--they superimpose a suffocating layer of unwritten laws on the endless millions of written ones. Another key point: the laws are far too extensive for anyone to understand--and many are also too complicated for anyone but professionals to understand. This is not necessary--in fact, it is an invitation to tyranny. If the people do not know the laws--and they do not--then the state can arbitrarily fine or imprison anyone it chooses. The definition of tyranny is unchecked executive power. And, be it noted, our hives of bureaucrats exercise far more executive power than the President.

The Mindset of Black America

Black psychology in America is a slavish psychology in the sense that Nietzsche means when referring to "slave morality." They transitioned from a slave class to a federally protected underclass, then were made wards of the state by LBJ, Nixon, and the "liberal consensus" of that time. In other words, they have always existed in a dependent status as a people, though they were progressively closing in on independent status during the Jim Crow era. Hence, burdened by this sense of a separate history, they do not conceptualize citizens' rights in the same way as other Americans, that such rights form the great bulwarks of individual liberty. They view liberty as a threat to their protected status, to the supposed safety of their dependency. Their other major psychological problem, and another fundamentally slavish condition of the mind, is a lack of trust in others. They mistrust non-blacks for historical and cultural reasons; they mistrust government due to its association with the police power; and they mistrust fellow blacks due to prevalent and atavistic criminal tendencies.

Judging from the history of the Jews (admittedly an entirely different culture in most ways and one which had the signal advantage of starting with and sustaining a unified cultural and religious tradition through their periods of enslavement), it may be that a people, once overcome by slavery and a slave morality, can only achieve a restoration of their full humanity by establishing and governing their own nation. Of course, this was attempted in the case of Liberia--but, in fairness, the attempt was, from the beginning, highly prejudiced by lack of resources. A counterpoint to this line of thought would be the case of the Indians, who, despite the opportunity to govern quasi-nations of their own, seem unable to escape their own version of slave psychology (though some of the casino Indians are now rather rich dependents). The ward-races of America, however, are too far domesticated by government largesse, and the elites of their races too corrupted by race quotas that divorce them from the highest aspirations of their peoples--under these conditions salutary reforms of political conditions that might redound to ennoble the unproductive, slave-minded races will not even be thought of, and will not be discussed, and will not happen.